Traditional Technical Communication Work
I usually group traditional technical communication work into the following categories:
- Pure Writing Focus—Deliverables designed for authors.
- Systems Focus—Deliverables designed for client organization personnel.
- User Focus—Deliverables designed for end users.
- Training Focus—Deliverables designed for students who must learn to use a product, and teachers who must make that objective a reality.
By the way, this chapter focuses on deliverables, not delivery platforms. For example: An operations document is a deliverable; it is generally called a user guide when you deliver it on a print platform, and online help when you deliver it on an electronic platform. So this chapter discusses operations documents, not user guides or online help.
Pure Writing Focus
The most common forms of traditional, pure-writing-focused technical communication deliverables include style guides and editorial review.
Most technical publication departments today are understaffed. So when a technical publication manager must choose between churning out product documentation or developing a style guide to standardize product documentation, the choice is painfully obvious.
Perhaps more distressing, many technical publication departments don't use the style guide they painstakingly produced—mostly because it's difficult to reference, but sometimes because department individuals never bought into its recommendations in the first place.
As for editorial review, even though technical publication managers understand its worth, they rarely have the time, money, or resources to create, let alone implement, a consistent editorial process.
Prove your worth as a professional technical communicator by shortening the publication cycle:
- You have an amazing amount of credibility as an outside consultant; use it to achieve intra–departmental consensus on acceptable standards.
- Improve style guide referenceability by delivering it online, complete with keyword and/or full-text search capability.
- Design and create document templates and boilerplate text that actually reflect the recommendations of the style guide.
- Implement an editorial process that complements work flow instead of impedes it—even if that means cutting corners. Some editorial review is better than none at all!
Systems Focus
There are all kinds of—and names for—system-focused technical communication deliverables. My personal favorites include these document types:
| Marketing Requirements | Designed for distribution outside the development team, this very first document in a product life cycle clarifies the justification for implementing a particular solution, explores the feasibility of implementing that solution, and provides a features/functions summary that serves as the base for all other product life cycle documents. |
|---|---|
| Functional Requirements | Also designed for distribution outside the development team, this second document in a product life cycle outlines the development team-accepted objectives for a solution. |
| User Interface Design | Specially designed for distribution outside the development team, this third document in a product life cycle outlines the user interface requirements and approaches for implementing the objectives accepted in the functional requirements document. |
| Design | This fifth document in a product life cycle is not distributed outside the development team. |
| Release | Once again designed for distribution outside the development team, this last document in a product life cycle outlines implemented objectives, resolved problems, and outstanding issues. |
The few times a client has provided systems-focused documentation for me to use as source material, it was virtually worthless because it:
- Was written in programmer-speak
- Focused completely on activities transparent to the user
- Was obsolete
Prove your worth as a professional technical communicator by shortening the time required to bring a product to market:
- Design and create a system-focused document set that includes user interface and user task components so that other departments (like product management, marketing, sales, training, etc.) can work in parallel with the development effort.
- Design and create a system-focused product document set that tracks features and functions as accepted, rejected, accepted with modifications, and deleted due to lack of resources so that all client departments can easily and accurately determine the true contents of a product release.
User Focus
I'm sure you've had opportunities to design and create all kinds of user-focused technical communication deliverables. I've personally produced the following:
- Operations documents
- Reference documents
- Maintenance documents
- Installation documents
- Getting started documents
- Quick reference documents
- Troubleshooting documents
Prove your worth as a professional technical communicator by saving your clients time and money:
- Persuade your clients to deliver user-focused technical communication electronically. Not only are printed documents more costly to produce than electronic documents, they are generally obsolete before you even get them to the printshop. In my opinion, the only printed technical communication a software product requires is installation instructions for the online technical communication!
- If you can’t convince your clients to invest the resources in producing an electronic user-focused documentation set truly designed for screen viewing, then just slap their printed user-focused documentation set online. It's still more cost-effective than printing.
If your clients still demand some form of printed user-focused technical communication deliverable (which is not unusual—even though customers don’t read user guides, they still demand the warm fuzzy of printed documentation before committing to a major purchase), don’t simply regurgitate (and try to maintain) information already available online — complement your online documentation set with printed material that’s:
- Usable—Organized the way your clients' audience (customers and prospective customers) already thinks, and short so that it's easy to skim or digest in one sitting.
- Multi-purpose—Can do triple duty as a follow-up marketing piece, a getting started guide, and a training tool.
- Long-lasting—Focuses on business processes instead of a laundry list of features or procedures, so that its shelf life can cover multiple product releases.
Sound impossible? On the contrary. Call me for information about how to create a SmartStart guide!
By the way, every time I think I don't need to say this anymore, I get an unpleasant surprise. Usable user-focused technical communication is task-based. Yes, you can still provide menu-, screen-, or component-based information, perhaps in appendices, but the primary organization of user-focused technical communication should focus on user tasks.
Training Focus
I'm sure you're all familiar with traditional training-focused technical communication deliverables like leader documents, participant documents, and training job aids.
Prove your worth as a technical communicator by saving your clients time and money:
Design and Create Leader Documents that Can Be Used by Non–Trainers
Many clients who cannot afford full–time training personnel have shifted the responsibility for training delivery to product experts who generally have no training experience or expertise.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's my experience that participants believe the advantages of learning from an instructor with experience in the trenches, coupled with prepared training materials, far outweighs any disadvantages resulting from an instructor's lack of training experience.
The key, of course, is prepared training materials—visuals, scripts, scenarios, worksheets descriptions of real–world problems, etc.—designed to help non-trainers focus their from-the-trenches expertise.
Take Advantage of Existing User–focused Technical Communication Deliverables
I'll never forget what happened the first time I pitched the idea of using existing user documentation as training materials to a sampling of client representatives who had a stake in the training program. A grizzled veteran of many irate help desk calls asked, wide-eyed, “You mean we won’t get any more questions from customers who say ‘but that’s not what it says in the book’ and it turns out that book is a three-year-old, out-of-date, student workbook we never saw before because we use standard documentation to solve customer problems?” The product manager turned to me and said “Go do it.”
An added benefit: If the information required for training isn't already in the standard user-focused documentation set, add it! That way you get viable training materials and improved user-focused documentation at the same time!
Design and Create Training Job Aids for Delivery Online
Not only do online training job aids shorten the training product delivery cycle, they also facilitate continuing accessibility to critical information. It's a lot harder to lose a computer than a dozen pieces of paper!